drchrono Raises Funding to Bring Medical Records to the iPad

Drchrono, a company that brings electronic health records to the iPad, has raised $675,000 in seed funding from General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Gmail creator and FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit, Google’s Principal Engineer Matt Cutts, and the Start Fund.

Y Combinator-backed drchrono simplifies the professional lives of doctors and medical professionals by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad. The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, dictate notes via audio, take pictures, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records.

The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. Drchrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.

And drchrono is more than just a simple iPad app. Doctors can upgrade to more storage for records, and complete medical billing. The billing component is another win for doctors, who spend hundreds of dollars each month for medical billing processing. Drchrono’s system integrates with all U.S. insurance companies, even the insurance agents that only use paper billing.

Since launching in February, drchrono has accumulated a physician user base of over 5000 users. Co-founder Daniel Kivatinos says that this growth has been purely organic, and that doctors have simple found the app in the App Store.

There’s no doubt that drchrono is entering the online medical space in an interesting time. As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals.

But not every initiative to bring medical records online has worked. For example, Google recently shuttered its online health platform Google Health. Kivatinos says that he believes that Google Health didn’t bring much innovation to the space beyond aggregation of information. Because drchrono includes distinct features like speech to text audio dictation functionality and integrations with insurance companies, the app provides value to doctors.

I have several medical professionals in my family and I can attest to the fact that paper records are in the past. At the very least, drchrono gives doctors an online repository for all of the information, like notes, prescriptions, dictations, images and other data. But I believe we are going to see more and more doctors turning to the iPad and other tablet devices for use in the exam room and operating room. Drchrono is in a great position if both of these trends scale significantly in the next few years.